Move Your Blog From WordPress to Blogger
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I've got a confession. I'm a
serial blogger. I find a new platform to play with every once in a while, and
I'll start a new blog. I hate deleting that blog a year later just because I
don't want to pay to host it anymore. I'd rather keep all my blogs, whether
regularly updated or semi-maintained. Fortunately, I can keep them all in one
place for free by using Blogger.
Moving a
blog from WordPress to Blogger is actually fairly simple as long as
you've got administrative access to your WordPress blog. Google's Chicago
office is the home to an engineering team that actually makes this pretty easy: The
Data Liberation Front. Their goal is to make it easy to move data to
and from any Google tool, and while they don't have a tool to directly move your
WordPress site to Blogger with a single click, they've simplified the process
and host the open-source resources we need.
One
thing that won't import is the general
look and feel of your blog. That's handled by the theme. You can pick a new
theme in Blogger, but you can't import your WordPress theme.
First Step - Export
The first thing you'll do to export
your WordPress blog. If it's a single person blog you maintain, this usually
isn't a problem.
1.
Log
in to your account wherever you're hosting it. In my case, I'm using a blog
hosted on my own domain with my own installation of WordPress software. You may
have started a blog on WordPress.com. The process is the same.
2.
Go
to the Dashboard.
3. Click on Tools: Export
4.
You'll
get some options here, so if you want only the posts or only the pages, you can
do that. In most cases, you'll want to export both.
5. Click on Download Export File.
You'll
end up downloading an export file with a name that looks something like
"nameoftheblog.wordpress.dateofexport.xml" This is an XML file specifically
designed as a backup of WordPress content. If your intent is to move your blog
from one WordPress server to another, you're set. In this case we need to
massage the data to get it to the format we need.
The Second Step - Conversion
The
Data Liberation Front hosts an open source project called the Google Blog
Converters, which is designed to do exactly what we need. The WordPress to Blogger conversion tool will
take that XML file and change the markup into Blogger's format.
1.
Upload
your file using the WordPress to Blogger tool.
2.
Press
Convert.
3. Save your converted file to your hard
drive.
In this case, you're going to get a
file named "blogger-export.xml." The only thing that's really changed
is the XML markup.
The Final Step - Import
Ok, now you've got your old blog data
converted to a format for Blogger. Now you've got to import that blog into
Blogger.
You could start a new blog, or you
could import your content into an existing blog. The dates of your posts will
be whatever date they were on WordPress, so if you had an old blog you forgot
about or didn't realize you could import, this is a good way to backfill your
content.
1.
Log
into Blogger, and go into the settings for your blog. The steps you use to get
there may vary a little, depending on whether you're using the old or new
version of the Blogger dashboard.
2. Go to Settings:
Other
3. Click on Import Blog
4. You'll need to browse for your
blogger-import.xml. (Don't try the original WordPress file. It won't work.) You
may need to enter some CAPTCHA text.
This is to prevent someone from using a script to hack your account and import
a bunch of spam posts.
5. Choose whether or not to
automatically publish all posts. Uncheck this box if you want your posts to be
imported as draft posts. It might be a good idea if you want to preview your
work and make sure everything imported as expected.
Congratulations, you're done. Inspect
your posts to make sure your images and content made the trip.
Once
everything is imported successfully, don't forget to let everyone know the blog
has moved and hide your old blog. In WordPress, this is located in the
Dashboard under Settings: Privacy. You should at
least hide it from search engines, even if you elect to keep the posts publicly
visible. You're welcome to leave both blogs as is, but this might be confusing
to blog visitors. It might also impact your placement in Google search results,
since duplicating content might make you look like a spam blog.
